Modern telecommunications make it possible for individuals to receive, in multi-media form, information that has been stored at a remote location. Conversely, information may also be transmitted to a remote storage medium for later retrieval by other parties. Typically, the information must be stored in the form of a series of messages that are categorized in some manner to aid in the process of selecting or storing a particular piece of information.
Multi-media information is defined as one or more of the following forms of information: images, ASCII or EBCDIC text, binary numeric data, audio text, video, and encoded control signals for sensory stimulations derived from sensory actions.
The concept of the invention may be understood by considering the storage and retrieval of audio messages via the telephone. In this case, the telephone is used as an input/output device to store/retrieve audio information in digital form on a computer. Such systems have been given the generic name audiotext services.
Various methods have been devised to enable the user a) to store a message in the proper place, and b) to quickly select a particular message from all those that are available. Thus, some form of search mechanism must be implemented, usually at the computer information store or storage medium, that will perform the storage and/or retrieval in a fast, fail-safe manner.
In the case of audiotext, the most common method of implementing such a mechanism is to present the caller with an audio menu, which, for example, prompts the caller as follows: "If you wish to hear your account balance, press 4" and "Please enter your social security number now". When the user presses a key, or set of keys, the next level of the menu is presented. Thus, the caller can be lead through a static menu tree until the identity of a particular stored item can be determined and played back to the caller. In a similar manner, the information system can prompt the user to respond to questions so that the correct storage location for the user's data input can be determined.
There are, however, several problems with this method of human-computer interaction with audiotext information. The general problem is that the number of menu levels and the number of menu items in each level must be limited, or otherwise the user gets lost. It has been found that most people, when confronted with a numbered list from which to choose, can only remember up to five or six items. Moreover, a deep or long menu list also becomes confusing to the caller, unless extra navigational aids are provided to help the user visualize the menu structure. To date, therefore, this type of interface can only be used with relatively simple applications that require a very limited menu, such as an application that provides a customer's bank balance.
Another method of presentation and control of audiotext services has been proposed in which the problems of a static menu structure are avoided by presenting a series of short excerpts of available items. This is analogous to modern car radios, where each radio station is automatically scanned, and played briefly, so that the listener can make a selection of the station he or she wishes to hear. In the case of an audiotext service, the user can press a particular key, say the "0" key, to stop the presentation of these excerpts and hear the entire message. The method presupposes that the messages are so dissimilar as to be immediately discernible by hearing an excerpt. Pressing say the "#" key will continue the excerpt presentation, and pressing that key twice in rapid succession will speed up the scan by jumping to every, say, fifth excerpt in the linear stream available. The approach works well when there are a limited number of messages to which to listen. Clearly, it will not be acceptable when there are, say, many thousands of messages from which to choose. Skipping messages does speed up the process, but a skipped message may be the one of particular interest.
A much more general problem is that of selecting particular types of stored messages based upon the values of their attributes that are unique to the message content. Suppose, for example, that data on thousands of used automobiles is stored as audiotext messages. The attributes associated with each automobile description might include: make, model, age, mileage, price, and color. If the caller were interested in finding those automobiles that had low mileage and low price, the current audiotext selection techniques would be unacceptable. The scanning technique would require that the caller listen to almost the entire set of messages to obtain the information, and the limited menu technique would require that the caller re-enter the menu for every make, model and age before reaching the mileage and price levels. If there were only three makes, three models, and three age ranges, the caller would have to enter the menu twenty seven times to hear all the available information on low mileage, low priced automobiles.
It is the purpose of the present invention to provide human-computer interaction with an audiotext service so that data items with multiple attributes can be stored and/or retrieved in a single pass of the menu in a fast, fail-safe manner. Furthermore, the invention provides comprehensive navigational aids to the caller that are indispensable when performing transactions with an extremely large multi-attribute database. A method of entering alphanumeric information into the system in an unambiguous manner is also described. Currently, alphanumeric information can be entered by pressing a single key on the telephone keypad, which transmits a dual-tone to a remote system. However, this dual-tone may represent up to three different characters on the keypad. For example, pressing "2" on the telephone keypad may represent the character "A", "B", or "C". The system has to determine the correct character by the context of the character within the sequence of transmitted characters. The ambiguous nature of this type of encoding may not be resolvable.
The invention is further extended to all audio/video/multi-media types of information and all mechanisms of audio, visual, tactile, or other sensor interfaces and transmission media.